Assessment of possible variation levels in percentage recovery of Polychlorinated Biphenyls (PCB) using an Automated SPE Extractor

Abstract

An assessment of percentage recovery using automated Solid Phase extractor (SPE) and traditional vacuum manifold SPE techniques for preliminary polychlorinated biphenyls extraction or clean-up process. The data presented in this paper shows a general interpretation, which reflects the slight variation in the stability of the percentage recovery for different PCBs samples after SPE clean up. From the result, it stated that traditional SPE for the PCB analytical clean-up methods is favourable when compared with the automated SPE methods. The difference in recovery process is clear except in the water sample (9002) and some soil samples (9003 and 9004) where the PCBs result were the same and below the limit of detection (< 0.02 μg/l and < 0.2 mg/l) for the water and soil samples respectively. The result shows that efficiency of both traditional PCB analytical clean-up methods and the automated SPE methods are in ratio of 4:3 respectively. Thus, resulting to a percentage efficiency of 57% and 43% for both traditional PCB analytical clean-up methods and the automated SPE
methods respectively. Therefore, the traditional PCB analytical clean-up methods are more efficient when compared with the automated SPE methods, as the difference in recovery process is clear, with higher value across various PCB component. Additionally, the PCBs value for the traditional method, which tends to be higher in most of the samples can be attributed to natural chromatographic flow of the solvents through the SPE matrix without any use of external force or pressure.